Email subscribers to the blog may have been sent a few extra emails Friday night, and we’re sorry for that but promise it was for good reason.
Our previous podcast host, SoundCloud, only allowed three hours of audio to be live at any one time. We recently found a way to host the podcast with the Internet Archive, which offers unlimited storage at no cost. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit (501[c][3]) library of digital everything, from audio, video, and text to the internet itself, searchable through its Wayback Machine.
You can now access all of our podcasts at one time through iTunes, Google Play, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and/or SoundCloud.
You can also download the .mp3s directly from the Internet Archive on our page.
Technical Details
If you’re interested in hosting your own podcast this way, it takes a little time but is not difficult. I followed the tutorial detailed here.
First, open an Internet Archive account. It’s free. Upload your .mp3 files to your account through their portal. I use the Creative Commons – Share Alike – Attributions license (CC-BY-SA) and check those options when I upload content.
Second, open a WordPress, Blogger, or other free blogging account. For each episode, create a blog post where you paste the address of the .mp3 file on the Internet Archive (find the link by right-clicking on “VBR MP3” under “Download Options” on the episode’s page and copying and pasting the link). I found I have to explicitly print out the link’s URL, that is, I couldn’t make a hyperlink with different text masking the URL, like this, for example.
Third, find the RSS feed for that blog page (you’ll have to consult the “help” page for your blog host, potentially). Copy that into Google’s Feedburner service and click “I’m a podcaster.” Follow the instructions to create the RSS feed friendly to podcasting distributors.
Fourth, get your podcast onto popular distributor apps, like iTunes, Google Play, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and others; each link here is to the starting page to get those processes going, but those instructions are beyond the scope of this short post.